If you're at all familiar with the legend of The Mummy, you already know its producers phoned writer/director Stephen Sommers the morning after the film opened to boffo business and told him to start preparing a sequel.  Now, almost two years to the day later, The Mummy Returns hits the screen with more action and an even dumber story, as completely far-fetched as that may seem.  It makes the original look like the greatest story ever told, when, in fact, it was a bloated, brainless action film that boasted only decent special effects and some odd casting which stuck (some) arthouse talent into a Hollywood blockbuster.

Returns is set almost a decade after the first film concluded, so here's a little update on your favorite characters.  Dashing Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser, Monkeybone), the former French Legion soldier, has unknowingly become The Chosen One because of a tattoo on his hand that we never saw in the original, even though his character mentions the fact that he got it in an orphanage as a child.  Rick is now married to Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz, Enemy at the Gates), who has made the remarkable transformation from bumbling librarian to something akin to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2.  Evie's brother Jonathan (John Hannah) is just as inept and unnecessary as ever, and the mysterious Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr, Deuce Bigalow) is still hanging around for some reason.

Christ – who am I kidding?  It doesn't make a lick of difference who is cast in these roles or what has happened to the characters since we've last seen them.  Fraser, Weisz & Co. could have been replaced with dogs and chimps wearing period costumes and the net result on the box office take would be negligible (if not a little better).  Returns is like many films that suffer from sequel-itis, finding half-assed ways to get the characters into the story, loading up the dialogue with gems like "Oh, no – not these guys again," as well as creating better bad guys (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) and new and improved good guys (Freddie Boath, who plays the son of Rick and Evie).

Returns kicks off with a scene set in 3067 BC, where we learn the confusing story of the Scorpion King (Johnson) and his band of deadly Anubis warriors. There's talk of curses and soul-selling and stuff, but there's so much action packed into these first five minutes, it's hard to keep up.  Long story short, the Scorpion King dies, but whoever finds his magic bracelet can revive him, kill him and take control of his fearsome fighters, presumably in hopes of world domination.  Oh, and if you're going to Returns because you're a fan of The People's Champion, you'll probably want to leave when this little intro is over because that's pretty much the last whiff you'll get of what the Rock is cookin'.

The film then switches gears and takes us to 1933 (the Year of the Scorpion, no less), where Rick and Evie unearth the Scorpion King's bracelet, which accidentally finds its way onto the hand of their son.  This, of course, means the Scorpion King will rise from the dead in just seven days and raise all kinds of trouble (as well as, we assume, his eyebrow).  In the meantime, a group of bad guys have located the remains of Imhotep (Billy Zane clone Arnold Vosloo) and wake him up from his dirt nap so he can do battle with the big SK and be reunited with his dead lover (Patricia Velazquez).  I'm still not sure who I was supposed to be rooting for.

The protagonists do a lot of moving around here, using strange modes of transportation (camel, double-decker bus, a wave, dirigible and train) throughout several different locations in an attempt to accomplish something that I'm not yet clear on.  One thing I do know is that it took way too long to get there.  At the 60-minute mark, there's still five days left before the Scorpion King is supposed to come back to life, and when he does, it's like getting coal for Christmas.  During one five-minute span, the film rips off Gremlins, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Star Wars and Princess Mononoke.  But why stop there?  Returns evens pilfers scenes from its original, which made me do one of those cartoon double-takes.

Sommers, whose previous film effort was the awful Deep Rising, has penned one of the worst stories of the year, smacking of more unoriginality than anything I've seen in a while.  Even the score from Alan Silvestri (The Mexican) seems like a calculated cross between Star Wars and Superman. Sure, the effects are good, but the whole Imhotep reanimation thing isn't nearly as cool as last year's Hollow Man.  Returns does look nice, though, with cinematographer Adrian Biddle returning from the original picture.